Jim Henderson

Garden Light
J – Welcome to my after-garden, Izzy! I’ve gotten daffodil bulbs to add, but I’m savoring summer a few minutes more. Admiring the brown of my feet, before boots.
I – How can I help?
J – Use the digger to make fifty holes in this part, six inches deep and about eight inches apart. Do not tumble down the hill.
I – What are you going to do?
J – Attend to your every position. Then issue your next instruction.
I – There are other wonders of the world. Why do your bare feet on a step-stone today feel cooler than your feet on the soil? After all, we know perfectly well the stone and soil are in thermal equilibrium. They have the same temperature.
J – You are very educational. And when you speak of such things, I imagine all the more positions, bed and floor.
I – Spring eternal?
J – Whichever comes first: either as long as it takes or as long as it takes. By the way, I do know how the stone and soil heat-thing works. Awaken to me.
I –  Speak the science of the stone and soil paradox.
J – We have skin receptors responsive to rate of heat flow into or out of the body when contacting materials with a different temperature than body temperature. Flow rate is slower into or from insulators such as air. And the dry soil is more insulating than the stone. So heat from my feet flows at a higher rate into stone than into the dry soil. Useful in philosophy? Stone floor? With rug?
I – I raise an eyelid. Let’s do the bulbs, Joey.
J – Tomorrow is another day.

Daybreak
J – Grüß Gott, Izzy!
I – Good Morning, Joey!
J – Kaffee?
I – Danke! The garden in this light is something else.
J – You in that easy satin robe are something else.
I – But that our reach exceed our grasp, or what’s a heaven for?*
J – Annie said the sun comes up tomorrow. That was only a metaphor for the human lot, of course. But literally, how would she know the sun would come up again?
I – An invariant run. But Melancholia, you know.
J – And you?
I – Spin of the earth is long as earth, but for arrival of external torque. Radiation out sun is long as its fusion. Shade of earth by a celestial body is not in prospect tomorrow.
J – May I kiss you?
I – So many days have not yet broken.*
*R. Browning, Rig Veda

Don't Tread on USA!
The US has said they will not attack targets inside Iran for their use of terrorist organizations to attack Iranian opponents. I hope, however, that the US has not taken destruction, sooner or later, of the entire Iranian navy off the table as among US retaliatory response actions.*

The greatest threat to the future of America as a prosperous place and place of civil peace is continuation of the federal deficit budgets of the last 23 years. The federal government is stealing the life savings of Americans by inflation to cover the ongoing budgets in the red. Against continuation of that: vote for Haley against Trump. The choice between Haley and Biden or Phillips will be more difficult because the Democrats are squarely Pro-Choice. But the choice between Haley and Trump at this stage is easily Haley.  As Bastiat put it: Let us try freedom.

Some handy helpful background:
Original Sin –from Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
Kant famously wrote: "out of such crooked wood as the human being is made, nothing entirely straight can be fabricated" (Idea for a Universal  History with a Cosmopolitan Aim, 1784, translation by Allen Wood). The context of this quote is an acknowledgement that formation and exercise of a political constitution for a society, is in human hands and minds, which means no constitution and its exercise can be perfect. The conclusion, I say, is fair enough truth, but the antecedent thought that humans are made of crooked timber—human nature is corrupt—seems very likely nothing original with Kant; rather, a common view, come down from the likes of Augustine and put about from Christian pulpits of Kant's era (and ours).
 
Grace, Predestination, and Original Sin –from Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
 
Catholic Encyclopedia – ORIGINAL SIN

Thanks for a refresher on the Christian notion of sin , going through some of the linked material reveals I am /have been under a more comfortable apprehension of sin in the other Abrahamic traditions. Sin more as a failing as opposed to a corporeal state.

Wooden Spool
Mother had fashioned of thick thread
a harness for the summer locust, 
thread run through the hole of the empty spool,
the locust to pull across the floor,
the children to smile.
 
None could know
the invisible thread
spool-full, the rough unwindings
of tomorrows and dreams,
tough rewindings, revisions.
 
The older boy to marriage and break
and poverty and roughneck
and loss of one arm
and women lost and wealth won
and death by cancer at fifty-four.
 
The younger boy to no woman,
no child, to books and pen ablaze,
to man life-love, from nineteen,
same age, to that man’s death at forty-one.
Orbits six more, to new man life-love.
 
The young girl, alone Mother’s own child,
to marriage, children, and theirs,
to failed health, non-stop pain,
and death at sixty-six.
 
That summer, its locusts,
that wooden spool a while more
in the second boy alone
still unwinding the invisible to visible.

Congratulations on 75 years! I'm only six months behind you and still trying to catch up.

I've made it to 75 today, and I'm still learning and writing fine!
(Birthday gift from my husband in the link – design by Eero Aarnio in 1960's.)

Israel's War -- Update | Yaron Brook
 
 

A neat guide to what is in OPAR is here.
Thanks to KP.

Kuhn's Intellectual Path <– a review by Howard Sankley of this book by K. Brad Wray
(My copy of that book of Wray's arrives tomorrow.)
Of related interest (which I have already):
The Essential Tension by Thomas Kuhn
The Road Since Structure edited by Conant and Haugeland
Reconsidering Logical Positivism by Michael Friedman
The Cambridge Companion to Carnap edited by Friedman and Creath
Scientific Revolutions edited by Ian Hacking
Interpreting Kuhn edited by Brad Wray
The Cognitive Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Anderson, Barker, and Chen
 
 

As an example of the popularity of this book, when I was in college in the late 1960s it was already part of the required reading for not only my History of Science course, but also the History of Economics and Sociology. 

Gravitational Effect on Motion of Anti-Matter Observed
 

"In a suit" means nothing. 
I take it that you mean he's a racist because he mentioned that it was not expected that a black Republican would win a 72% Latino district. He's arguing for his electability, of which the demographic fact he mentioned is relevant. I don't see that as racist. But if it is, then Trump displays racism every time he boasts about the number of Hispanic votes he got. 
20% of $350M is not peanuts.

Religion in Human Evolution – From the Paleolithic to the Axial Age
Robert N. Bellah (Harvard 2017)
https://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674975347&content=toc
Start with chapter 7 for your interest in Ancient Greeks and their prelude. Jump back to earlier material in the book for needed wider layout and the terminology (use Index).
The Beginnings of Western Science – The European Scientific Tradition in Philosophical, Religious, and Institutional Context, Prehistory to A.D. 1450
David C. Lindberg (Chicago 2007, 2nd edition)
https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/B/bo5550077.html 
1. SCIENCE BEFORE THE GREEKS
     What Is Science?
     Prehistoric Attitudes toward Nature 
     The Beginnings of Science in Egypt and Mesopotamia

2. THE GREEKS AND THE COSMOS
     The World of Homer and Hesiod
     The First Greek Philosophers
     The Milesians and the Question of Underlying Reality
     The Question of Change
     The Problem of Knowledge
     Plato’s World of Forms
     Plato’s Cosmology
     The Achievement of Early Greek Philosophy

3. ARISTOTLE’S PHILOSOPHY OF NATURE
     Life and Works
     Metaphysics and Epistemology
     Nature and Change
     Cosmology
     Motion, Terrestrial and Celestial
     Aristotle as a Biologist
     Aristotle’s Achievement
. . .
 

I studied the history of science with David Lindberg as my professor at the University of Wisconsin in the early 1970s. He instilled in me and interest in this topic that has continued till today.

Koch spending $70 million is peanuts compared to $350 million Mark Zuckerberg spent in 2020,  see: https://www.npr.org/2020/12/08/943242106/how-private-money-from-facebooks-ceo-saved-the-2020-election .  That spending was just on getting the votes counted (for Biden) and wasn't part of the more than one billion spent by the Biden Campaign. 

The Journal of Ayn Rand Studies,  Vol. 23, Nos. 1–2, (2023), pp. 218–79.
MARSHA FAMILIARO ENRIGHT
~Comment by me on core of Marsha's paper:
In the natural formation of the first cell, the potentials of the physical factors going into that formation are not, singly or together, ends-directed to getting that formation. Enright concurs in that. That unicellular organisms have self-directing behaviors (without intentionality, but directive all the same) would seem then to be the result purely of physical factors not having self-directing behaviors. And, as Enright acknowledges to some extent, the ongoing research on how that first natural formation happened would seem to be an important part of explaining how life, with its self-directing characteristics, has come to be. (That is, as well, how value came into the world.) At Objectivism Online, we have a thread that accumulates research on the origin of life.
Clastic sedimentary rocks, such as sandstone, are formed from other types of rock already present and by certain physical conditions on the surface of the planet. It is an ends-free series of events that there comes to be clastic sedimentary rocks. It seem to me credible that the first natural cell could be formed by ends-free series of events. Once living things have appeared, ends-free series of events can continue to occur to them and within them, which may be detrimental to continuing that form of life or may be harmless or advantageous. To the result of successor life, because there are numerous single-cell individuals and colonies and multicellular organisms, such organism-rennovations upon novel events are never purely series of accidents. I don’t think that would be a fair way to characterize them in contrast to self-direction. Rather, they are ends-free incidents popping up under the follow-on crushing circumstance of natural selection. Like engineering something under a lot of trial and error and keep trying. Only with nature, there is no trying, only novel occurrence and its continuance within life or not. Explaining life-continuing vegetative behaviors such as response of gravitropic roots on occasion of uprooting in terms of physical and chemical sequences is explanation (only partial if without the larger evolutionary context) of self-directive behavior, but it is no denial or making small of the fact it explains.
There are old notions in organismic biology that did need to be radically reduced, or explained away. Meaning we could and should stop using them. Just as the use of the phrase and idea “natural selection” as a force, which Enright mentions. Or, perhaps, for that matter, thinking of a concentration gradient as a driver of diffusion. Most famously for biology I gather was the notion of “vital force” (as in the vitalism history Enright addresses). I have a solid modern science book titled The Vital Force: A Study of Bioenergetics. The notion of a vital force was such a cover for ignorance and warrant for intellectual laziness and often magical accounting of life, that it is best by now to boot it and replace it with the bioenergetic account.
I suggest, as does Enright, that that is unlike the situation of the phenomena of directedness in living systems, including in vegetative systems. Although one states the function of a part in a machine (a part such as a spark plug) at the level of system design for such a machine—cf. schematic diagrams v. wiring diagrams of electrical appliances—one nevertheless thinks of the part in its function as a cause. This suggest that, similarly, it is sensible to think of function of an organism part, such as ribosomes or mitochondria, as actual causes (function-driven ones), but causes requiring implementation by the structured physics and chemistry which underlies their operation. The circumstance that the schematic diagram in the natural organism case has been drawn only after the appearance of organisms themselves is no impairment to the effectiveness of the analytic parallel.
Enright’s ample layout on Harry Binswanger’s book The Biological Basis of Teleological Concepts is nice, and I think it gives the reader of her paper who has not read him a pretty fair picture of what he was up to. I do not concur in Enright’s particular criticisms of his account. And more generally, I do not concur in Enright’s statement of a contemporary intellectual problem in biology—seeing actions of survival and reproduction as “just inanimate chemical and physical actions” (219)—and need of any remedy for such a thing.
Enright has good information on relation of life to thermodynamics. Although, I’d stress that living things do not violate conservation of energy or the second law of thermodynamics. Utilities came into existence only with the advent of life in the universe, Rand and I and Marsha affirm. The utilization of energy and the storage of energy for utility are processes due to life and its nature, but perfectly in tune with all the physics of energy. Also, as Enright mentions, living systems are open systems, thermodynamically speaking. I’d stress with that that living processes are fully in accord with the laws of thermodynamics; life is not cheating them or getting around them. The perpetual production of entropy by life or any operations of organized matter is compensated for in a living system by the infusion of energy or energy-rich matter preserving the living organization. Metabolism is no affront to thermodynamics. Metabolism is the turnover of free energy—a thermodynamic concept important for some important engineering—for use in life.

David Tyson sensibly takes inference to include these varieties: deduction, induction, and abduction. He takes recognition of presuppositions to also be a kind of inference. This last strains the English word inference. Tyson’s program, however, of setting up two distinguished kinds of foundationalism, presuppositional v. deductive, can get underway (and crash just as well) without casting recognition of presuppositions as a kind of inference.
Tyson makes his distinction of those two sorts of foundationalism as follows:
“Deductive foundationalism evaluates whether a certain item of knowledge is foundational [α] in terms of being most prior through deduction or entailment, and foundational knowledge is [β] held in the form of deductive axioms that serve as premises from which necessary conclusions can be inferred by deduction or entailment.
“Presuppositional foundationalism evaluates the foundational status of knowledge [α’] in terms of being logically most prior, and foundational knowledge is [β’] held in presuppositional axioms, which serve as presuppositions that provide the necessary conditions that make the rest of knowledge possible.” (155)
Tyson makes the intellectual-history claim that until the last century deductive foundationalism was the model of knowledge. He claims that Euclidean geometry and Aristotle set that model. On that model, there is basic knowledge that supports, or founds, all other knowledge and justifies it. If the relation between the basic knowledge and non-basic knowledge is deduction and entailment, we have deductive foundationalism. If the relation between basic and non-basic knowledge is by presupposition, we have presuppositional foundationalism.
Tyson does not cite the precise places in Aristotle for what is here being called deductive foundationalism. But Tyson refers us to a nice online survey of foundationalism by philosopher Ted Poston, and there we are told to look to Posterior Analytics. As I recall, it is at II.19 that we find the influential model of knowledge (most snobbish sort of knowledge—science), and this is not the same as the structure of knowledge we find in Euclid, though both employ deduction in their ramifications.
One version of foundationalism that Poston discusses is that of Descartes. Tyson places Descartes’s foundationalism under his class “deductive foundationalism.” True to Tyson’s criteria for that class, Descartes did allege that the philosophic bases he established in Meditations were necessary support for scientific knowledge such as geometry. Descartes rightly got some flack over that particular “founding” since it is plain that geometers proceed the same whether or not they know that the soundness of procedures in geometry rest on the demonstration that there is a non-deceiving God settling that soundness of them.
As for the knowledge-structure of Meditations itself, Descartes regarded putting it into a deductive form wherein there are postulates, axioms, and definitions from which his conclusions are drawn–he rated such as that inferior to the process he chose in Meditations for bringing the reader into the light. Then too, the procedure that Descartes touted for justifying his scientific successes (such as his theory of the rainbow) was not the procedure set out by Aristotle for scientific knowledge. So I don’t think Descartes is suitable as instance of Tyson’s deductive foundationalism.
Spinoza or Wolff are suitable, I notice. Μοre precisely, the metaphysics of Spinoza and of Wolff fall under [β] rather than [β’]. The distinction between [α] and [α’] is none, so I don’t expect any philosophy can be brought forth which falls under the one but not the other.
Tyson attempts to fortify his distinction between deductive foundationalism and presuppositional foundationalism by having the former establish the correctness of its axioms by intuition and having the latter establish the correctness of its axioms by showing them to be undeniable on pain of self-contradiction. To which should we consign Spinoza’s axiom “Whatever is, is either in itself or in another.”? I do not recommend Tyson’s distinction between “deductive foundationalism” and “presuppositional foundationalism” as a clarifying one for analyses of foundational philosophies.
There are bits of misinformation in Tyson’s paper which I should squiggly-underline. He tries to demarcate the distinction(s) in philosophy between implication and entailment as technical terms, and stumbles (158–59). Solid online information on entailment is available in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Check within the entry on Bolzano and the entry on Relevance Logic.
Tyson sows confusion when he writes: “5. Entailment is progressive and synthetic (not regressive and analytic)—that is, it moves forward from premises to conclusion by deductive inference. (Example: Euclidean geometry, which draws theorems and other conclusions from axioms, is synthetic.[6])” 
Note 6 is a quotation from Morris Klein introducing the distinction between synthetic and analytic geometry, which is unrelated to the distinction in logic, from Aristotle, between the synthetic and the analytic. 
The result is the impression that Euclidean geometry is only synthetic geometry, not analytic geometry. And that is incorrect. Euclidean geometry as Euclid presents it and we learn it in high school is a synthetic geometry, but it can also be cast as an analytic geometry, as when we write (in a coordinate system) the equations of two intersecting lines, equate them, and solve for the location of the point(s) they have in common.

I would not vote for Asa Hutchinson for President, and that is on account of his position on the legality of elective abortions. I do like his emphasis on balancing the federal budget.* His advice on the Trump candidacy is sensible.* Hillary Clinton did not drop out of the general election when, nine days before election day, it was announced by the FBI Director that the investigation into her emails while Secretary of State was being reopened due to a new source of information. But reopening an investigation is less advanced in legal process than an indictment, and she was in the general election, where withdrawal would mean putting Trump into Presidential power point blank. As it worked out, even that reopening of her case destroyed her lead in the race, and we got Trump. Mr. Trump is, of course, innocent until proven guilty at trial, but just as many voters did not want to be going into the new term with a legal shadow over a Pres. H. Clinton, so they would not want to be going into the new term with an even darker legal shadow over a Pres. Donald Trump. 

Taxpayer-Funded Religious Charter School

The Rise and Fall of Classical Greece is  exceptional in its recognition that Aristotle was right, as demonstrated by the success of the independent Greek city states, when he posited that humans "are distinctive among social animals in our natural capacities to use reason and our ability to communicate complex ideas and information through language." (p 54)